Technology

Downsizing the Pi Network

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I keep a blog idea board in my Trello app so I can track all the things I want to write about, because I’ll come up with an idea for a post and then promptly forget it. Of course, sometimes I also add it to the board and still forget about it for years. By the time I rediscover it, the topic isn’t relevant anymore, or I’ve already written something similar. But I digress.

One of those old notes was about the state of my Pi network. I wrote it down a year ago, maybe updated it earlier this year, and now I’ve finally made enough changes that it’s worth revisiting.

I’ve owned pretty much every generation of Raspberry Pi. Actually, I think I’ve owned all the main variants from each generation, not the tiny ones or the 400/500 models that are built into keyboards, but all the standard boards. I bought the original Raspberry Pi 1, set it up, played with it, and then never really deployed it for anything meaningful. By the time I wanted to, the Pi 2 had already come out, so I bought one of those. At some point I got rid of the Pi 1, maybe gave it away, but I’ve kept just about every other one since.

The backbone of my original home network was built on Raspberry Pi 2s. I had five of them running my early private cloud backup network. Over time, I upgraded them with new cases, official Wi-Fi adapters, and less reliance on Ethernet. Then the Pi 3s came out, and I added a few of those for compute jobs. Then came the Pi 4s, and I gradually shifted everything over again.

Eventually, I stopped using the 2s and most of the 3s, and my little network of Pis became mostly 4s. I think I had around four or five of them running various workloads. When the Pi 5s came out, I didn’t jump immediately, but I have about four of them now.

Funny thing is, I’m using less compute now than ever. The main purpose of the Pi cluster used to be my Docker setup, which ran parts of my media center, a Minecraft server, and Homebridge for connecting Ring cameras to Apple HomeKit. Most of that has since moved or shut down.

I replaced the Ring cameras, so no need for Homebridge. Plex moved to my Synology DiskStation because the transcoding works better there. The Docker stack was easy enough to migrate, so that freed up another Pi.

These days, I’m really only using:

One Resilio Sync node for backups One BorgBackup setup for immutable backups One Pi as a Tailscale exit node And a Raspberry Pi 4 running Pi-hole for DHCP and DNS in the house

Everything else runs on Pi 5s, though even that’s more power than I need. When I built out the 5s earlier this year, I decided to stop using SD cards and external drives. I got cases with SSD add-ons, most with 256 GB drives, and one with a 2 TB SSD for backups. It’s a neat all-in-one box setup.

The Pi 4, especially the 8 GB version, is still a perfectly good piece of kit, but I just don’t have enough for it to do. So I’ve started selling them off on eBay. I’ve already sold a couple of the 4s and gotten a surprisingly good return for hardware that’s several years old. I’ve sold all of my 3s and am now selling the 2s. Apparently, people still buy them for nostalgia or small projects.

A few of my old ones are in official cases, and two are even in LEGO cases with camera kits. They look great, but I’m trying to pare everything down so I’m left with only the Pi 5s, and maybe I’ll move the Pi-hole over to a 5 while I’m at it.

Maintaining the hardware takes a decent amount of time and effort, and with what I’m doing now, renting a virtual private server is just simpler. My web hosting, where this blog lives, runs on a VPS with 2.5 GB of RAM, a single virtual core, and about 40 GB of storage, all for around $23 a year. It’s based in Dublin and does the job beautifully.

Building a Pi 5 setup can easily cost around four times that, even if it gives me more power than I’ll ever use. I’m not planning to get rid of the 5s I already have since they’re great machines, but I’ve reduced what I actually run on them. Justifying keeping all the older models sitting around isn’t really there anymore. For most of what I run these days, a VPS or my upgraded DiskStation handles it fine.

So yes, I’m officially downgrading, selling off hardware, consolidating services, and simplifying. I still love tinkering, but the Pi 5s are plenty. The rest? Off to eBay.

Please Take My Money (Sort Of): Zizzi Edition

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Here’s another entry in my ongoing series about payment apps and POS systems, otherwise known as “please, for the love of all things, take my money.”

This time, it’s about Zizzi.

We like Zizzi. Pretty good for a chain, consistent, close to home. The kids enjoy it, and I’m a sucker for a solid lasagna, so it works.

A while back, they introduced the option to order right from your table. You scan, browse the menu, and place your order online. In theory, convenient. In reality, not so much.

The first time we tried it, the whole thing collapsed like a bad soufflé. I think we spent 15 minutes trying to order before admitting defeat. Then the waiter came over, who, to their credit, also had trouble with the system. When the staff can’t make the app work, that’s not a user problem. That’s a “this is broken” problem. Logging in, confirming the order, something always failed. After twenty minutes of tech support cosplay, we gave up and just ordered the old-fashioned way.

Since then, I’ve avoided the “order at the table” gimmick. My appetite doesn’t need a debugging session before pasta.

That said, Zizzi redeems itself with their payment setup. That’s where they actually get things right. You scan the QR code, pay with Apple Pay (no logins, no fuss), and it just works. Recently we had one of the kids’ birthday dinners there, large table, chaos, cake, the usual. The service was great, and paying through the app was quick and clean.

There was one hiccup: the app didn’t let us add a tip. And we really wanted to, because the staff had gone above and beyond with the birthday stuff. We ended up having to flag someone down, who couldn’t add it either. Apparently, the built-in service charge meant we were done. Nice in theory, but awkward when you actually want to leave extra.

Still, credit where it’s due. Ordering? Fail. Paying? Solid.

Zizzi gets a mixed review from me, half frustration, half appreciation. The tech that takes my money works great. The tech that takes my order? Not so much.

My Quiet Breakup with the AirPods Max

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I have always been a Bose guy. For years I used their wired gel earbuds, which were way better than the old Apple earbuds we all pretended were acceptable back then. I even had one of their sound bar’s when I downsized from a full five speaker setup. Bose has always been one of those brands people either love or love to argue about, but I have always been in the “I like their stuff” camp.

About ten years ago, maybe more, I bought the Bose QuietComfort 2 noise cancelling headphones. They were around two to three hundred dollars at the time, and they were fantastic. They still work. Every now and then I would pick them up and think, “Do I really need anything better than this”

Fast forward to 2024. Apple had the AirPods Max out and I kept circling them like some kind of expensive tech craving predator. They were wireless, premium, comfortable looking, and supposedly had incredible noise cancellation. A friend of mine had a very specific problem with them, the kind of issue that only bothers a certain type of person, but still, the Max looked like a great piece of gear.

Meanwhile, I was mostly using regular AirPods for day to day things. They were fine. Good enough for the train, calls, and everyday commuting. At some point I got the AirPods Pro, but the timeline is fuzzy. Either way, the big over ear headphones were for serious travel and the little buds were for everything else.

Then my wife mentioned she was curious about noise cancelling headphones. Her use case was tiny, maybe once a month. I could not see her spending a lot on a brand new pair, so I said, “Do you want mine” meaning the Bose. And in that moment my brain went, “Well, this is the excuse I needed.” I handed her the Bose, she accepted them, and I immediately gave myself permission to finally get the AirPods Max.

And that is exactly what I did. She still has the Bose, and I walked away happy with the Max.

To be fair, they are genuinely great headphones. I used them in the office all the time. I used them on planes and they were fantastic. I never wore them while walking around because they are too big and clunky for me, even though plenty of people seem very comfortable doing exactly that. Good for them, not for me.

Eventually I started noticing a familiar problem: the glasses issue.

I have worn glasses forever and over ear headphones always put pressure on the frames. Sometimes it is fine, and then other times it slowly becomes “Why does the side of my head hurt like someone has been squeezing it for an hour” With the Bose it was manageable. With the AirPods Max and their firmer ear cushions, it became noticeably worse. My most recent pair of glasses, which might be wider, made it borderline uncomfortable. On flights I would take the Max off every so often to give my head a break. I even watched a movie without my glasses just to avoid the pressure, which felt ridiculous.

Around the same time, my regular AirPods finally died, as they eventually do. So I upgraded to the AirPods Pro. And I was honestly surprised at how good the noise cancellation was. Surprisingly good. “Maybe I do not actually need the giant expensive headphones” good.

I took a couple of trips this past year where I brought both the Max and the Pros. Every time, the Pros won. Comfort alone did it. Eventually I told myself, “If I take the Max on this trip and do not use them at all, I will sell them.”

That is exactly what happened.

Then Apple released the newest AirPods Pro that September with even better noise cancellation, and I basically bought them immediately.

So in November I finally sold the AirPods Max on eBay and I do not miss them at all.

They are fantastic hardware. They look great and sound great. But they are not comfortable for me, and I am not someone who walks around the city wearing over ear headphones every day. I tried. It is just not who I am. The amount of space in my carry on that I saved by not using them is also noticable.

Now I am down to the AirPods Pro for travel, commuting, calls, and pretty much everything else. They are basically always in my pocket. They are small, comfortable, and they do not crush my glasses into the side of my head. I keep a spare pair of old wired earbuds in my bag and that is all I need.

So yes, technically the AirPods Max are better. But the headphones I actually use are the ones that win.

Please Take My Money: Wagamama Edition

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I spend a lot of time talking about bad experiences because, honestly, there are plenty to go around. But every so often, someone actually gets it right. And today, or at least initially, that someone was Wagamama, until they then later didn’t but no spoilers yet.

I like Wagamama. One of my daughters likes Wagamama. The other one… not so much. Which means we do not go as often as I would like. Recently, though, the less enthusiastic one has been a bit more open to it, which has resulted in a few bonus noodle nights for me.

The food is always good. The service is consistently fine. And it is one of those places where everyone seems slightly happier after they eat. But what caught my attention this time was not the food. It was the payment process.

After the meal, instead of trying to make awkward eye contact with a server while doing the universal “please bring the bill” hand wave, there is a small QR code on the table. You scan it and it immediately knows what you ordered. No typing. No logging in. No nonsense. Just “Here is your total.”

You can pay right there with Apple Pay, or Google Pay if that is your thing and you enjoy giving Google more information about your life. No account creation. No mysterious third party checkout flow. You can even have the itemised receipt emailed to you, which, as someone who really dislikes handing out an email address, says a lot.

It was fast. It was clean. It worked.

They also let you order food through their app or website. I am not entirely sure which one it is because I have not actually tried it yet, but it looks slick. Given how smooth the in-restaurant payment felt, I assumed they had nailed that part too.

So at that point, credit where it was due. Seamless checkout, transparent receipts, and very little friction. This is how digital payments should work.

Then we went back.

Side note first: A was totally fine with going this time, which feels like real progress and deserves its own quiet celebration.

The reason I am updating this entry, though, is that paying was not quite as effortless as I remembered. This time the QR code was still there, but we also had to enter a table number and the location name. I swear we did not have to do that before. Maybe they changed it. Maybe I forgot. Either way, it added a bit more friction.

What really stood out, though, was that even after choosing Apple Pay, I still had to enter personal details. Not the worst possible outcome since I did not have to register an account, but still more personally identifiable information than I would have liked. Enough that I noticed it. Enough that it annoyed me.

For what it is worth, I just used slightly inaccurate details since it did not affect the Apple Pay transaction at all. The payment went through fine. But that kind of thing chips away at the “this is perfect” feeling pretty quickly.

So yes, they still get a lot right. It is still better than most places. But it is not quite as frictionless as I first thought.

Which, honestly, is how most good systems fail. Not catastrophically. Just by adding one extra step that did not really need to be there.

Still, the katsu chicken was excellent. And I will absolutely go back.

Please Take My Money: Green King

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It’s time for another round of Please Take My Money, the ongoing saga of payment systems that either make it ridiculously easy to spend money or somehow turn it into a test of patience and willpower.

Today’s contestant: Green King.

When I think back, I don’t even remember Green King having an online payment system before COVID. Maybe they did, but it certainly wasn’t memorable. Then lockdown happened, and suddenly the idea of ordering from your phone became not just convenient, but essential.

After restrictions lifted, one of the first places we went was our local Green King pub. For the first time, they had an online ordering option. I actually thought that was great. One thing the pandemic got right, if we can say that about anything, is the ability to order food and drinks from your table instead of waiting in line at the bar.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I like the charm of a proper English pub. I don’t mind going up to order a drink. But queuing to order food? Hard pass. So the fact that Green King introduced mobile ordering felt like progress.

Originally you had to register for an account. Nothing kills “convenience” faster than “please create a password.” I get that companies want to collect data and “build loyalty,” but if you’re in the business of selling me a sandwich and a beer, maybe focus on that. I don’t need another account to forget about.

Anyway, once I begrudgingly registered, it worked fine. I could order food, add my table number, and my meal magically appeared without waiting at the bar. That alone put Green King ahead of some others I’ve tried. So let’s call the early days a neutral: annoying sign-up, but decent execution.

Fast forward a few years, and they’ve clearly learned. The app no longer requires you to store your card details. You can just pay with Apple Pay or Google Pay and be done. No extra forms, no saved card nonsense, no trust fall into yet another company’s database.

And that’s the thing. Retailers love to say they “take security seriously.” The reality is that they may not be able to focus on it as deeply as a credit card company or a bank does, which is understandable. So when an app lets me not store my card details, that’s a feature, not an inconvenience. It’s basically zero knowledge in practice. If they ever get hacked, it won’t matter, because my card details were never there to steal in the first place.

These days, ordering through Green King’s app is smooth. You tap, pay, and your order’s on its way. Seamless. Efficient. Almost enjoyable.

So, after a rocky start, Green King has graduated from “barely tolerable” to “actually pretty great.” They finally figured out the assignment: make it easy for me to give you my money.

The Dot Group Problem

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This post is partially channeling my wife’s outrage, but as the household tech support department, I’m equally annoyed.Here’s the story.

The .group top-level domain (TLD) launched in 2015. I know this because I looked it up after dealing with this nonsense. My wife has a personal domain name using .group. It’s short, simple, and sounded nice and professional when we registered it.

We both use a mail service that supports unlimited aliases. Every new website or service gets its own unique email address. That way, when one of them leaks or gets sold, we know exactly who’s responsible for the spam. It’s a great system.

Today, for example, I got an obviously dodgy email pretending to be from a legitimate service provider. It was already flagged as spam, but even if it hadn’t been, I could tell it wasn’t real because it was sent to an alias I’d only ever used for a different service. Case closed.

So yes, that whole “unique email per service” setup works brilliantly. And my wife has adopted it too, with some encouragement from me and a bit of technical assistance.

Now here’s where the outrage begins.

It’s 2025. The .group domain has been around for ten years. There are hundreds of new top-level domains now. And yet, there are still websites out there that refuse to accept an email address ending in .group.

She’ll try to register for something, type in her perfectly valid address, and the site throws back: “Please enter a valid email address.” Excuse me? It is a valid email address. The site’s validation code just isn’t built to handle it.

This drives me absolutely mad. I’ve built and supported web applications for years in e-commerce, corporate systems, and startup products. It’s baffling that companies still don’t invest in maintaining their websites properly. Maybe they don’t know how modern validation should work, or maybe they just haven’t prioritized it. Either way, it’s not a great look in 2025.

Our fix was simple, if slightly irritating: we bought another domain. It’s not quite as clean or memorable as the .group one, but my wife liked it, and it works. It’s a standard .uk domain, which every site on the planet seems to accept without complaint.

Problem solved, more or less. The new domain costs about five pounds a year, which is fine. The annoying part is that the .group domain, the one she can’t use everywhere, is about three times that price. But it’s tied into too many existing services to just drop.

That’s the real downside of using custom domains for email. Once you build your digital life around one, moving away from it is basically impossible.

So now, our workaround is simple. We’re keeping the .group domain active for existing logins and old services but using the new .uk address for anything new.

It’s not the fault of the .group registry. It’s just a side effect of how unevenly the web is maintained. Some companies build things properly, others never update. And here we are, ten years later, still running into “invalid email address” errors for perfectly valid ones.

Please Take My Money, GBK

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I don’t know why this topic grabs my attention the way it does. Maybe it’s because I’ve been quietly fascinated by how we pay for things ever since contactless cards appeared. Or maybe it goes back even further to this tech show I watched years ago. It was probably the early 2000s, maybe even before that, and they were covering a guy in Singapore who tried to spend an entire day using only a watch that was linked to the local payment system. It was a test for the show, and he actually pulled it off. He managed to buy food, travel around, and live his normal routine without touching his wallet once. I thought that was the coolest thing.

So when tap to pay and mobile wallets finally arrived, I was ready. It felt like the future was catching up. But over time, I’ve learned that not all of these systems deserve to exist. Some work beautifully. Others are so clumsy they make you nostalgic for exact change.

I’ve written before about those “Please Take My Money” moments, the times when businesses make it weirdly difficult for customers to give them money. This is in that same spirit, just focused on the modern point of sale experience, or really the broader world of how we’re expected to pay for things now. Some places get it right. Others seem to treat usability like a design flaw.

And that’s how we arrive at GBK, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, which manages to turn something simple into a mild endurance test.

GBK: The Anti Convenience Experience

GBK lets you order at the counter or through their app. In theory, that’s flexible. In practice, it’s annoying. When I’m sitting at a table, I don’t want to get up and stand in line like I’m at McDonald’s. GBK isn’t supposed to be that kind of place.

We’ve been to the Stratford location several times, and every time it’s the same story. Between my wife’s Three network, my EE connection, and even my work phone on a different provider, none of us can get a decent signal inside. So you try their free Wi Fi, which of course wants a bunch of personal details before letting you in. It’s not free. It’s just data collection in disguise.

Once you’re connected, the app insists that you register. You can’t just use Apple Pay or Google Pay. You have to create an account, fill in your billing details, and basically hand over your life story before you can order a burger. The irony is that the whole point of tap to pay systems was to skip that kind of nonsense. But GBK wants your information, not your convenience.

After fighting with the app a few times, we gave up and just started ordering at the counter again. The food’s fine, good even, but the ordering system makes the experience harder than it needs to be. It’s like they built a digital wall between customers and the register.

The Bigger Problem

This isn’t just about GBK. It’s about how so many modern payment systems have completely missed the point. They were supposed to make life easier, but in too many cases, they’ve turned into data traps or loyalty funnels. The best systems disappear into the background. You pay, and that’s it. No account, no registration, no email sign up, no exclusive offers. Just pay and eat.

GBK gets a fail from me. I’ll keep writing about more of these experiences because some places do get it right, and others, well, not even close.

So yes, GBK, please take my money. Just stop making me work so hard for it.

The Story of Collecting VPS’s

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Back when I was working at Thomson Reuters in New York, maybe eight years ago now, a friend told me about LowEndBox.com and the cheap VPS you could get on subscription. At the time, I was mostly doing my hosting at home, maybe just running this blog, so I filed the info away and didn’t do much with it.

After moving to the UK, I started checking the site periodically, and he wasn’t wrong. They had some wild deals, like a decently powered VPS for under $20 a year if you caught a special. Considering I was used to paying $15 a month for fairly limited hosting, the idea of getting a whole VPS for the cost of one month, but for a full year, was too good to ignore. Most of the big offers came around the holidays such as Black Friday, Christmas, or New Year, but there were deals sprinkled throughout the year too. Eventually, after seeing a Black Friday promotion, I thought: for $20, I waste more on random stuff, why not try this? I grabbed one hosted in the Netherlands and liked it a lot.

That was the start of my little VPS collection. One of them now runs hosting for my blog, set up with YunoHost on Debian. It’s been my favourite self-hosting stack: simple to install WordPress and other apps, stable, easy to back up, restore, and even migrate. I’ve moved my hosting from the Netherlands to Ireland with no real issues.

Since then, I’ve picked up a few more in different places. I’ve got a couple in Texas I’ve been using as VPN endpoints, another one I pay about €8 a month for as a remote node in my backup network with around 2 TB of storage, and a handful of ultra-cheap hosting plans that cost me less than $15 a year. Some of those I don’t even really use anymore, like CPanel hosting for multiple domains, but the VPS setups are still going strong.

At this point I’ve got three or four VPSs running different services, plus a couple of extra hosting plans I may or may not renew when they come up. I’m tempted to add another storage VPS just to play around with Borg backup, though I still keep Resilio running for sync backups. Between the VPN endpoint in the US, my regular hosting, and the backup nodes, I’m definitely collecting VPSs.

Will I pare it down someday? Maybe. But even with all of them, the cost is still half or less than what I used to pay for a single hosting plan ten years ago. Pretty crazy, really.

Watch Costs are Relative

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I’ve always found it a little funny when people complain about how expensive an Apple Watch is. For me, the cost has never been the barrier to owning one. Right now I’m wearing a Series 10 46mm. It’s not the cheapest watch I own, but it’s close. The actual cheapest is my Seiko SKX007, which I picked up a couple of summers ago as a knock-around watch for the beach.

I bring this up because my Omega Speedmaster X-33 recently needed a battery replacement. While it was at Omega, they called to say it also needed a full service. Not exactly shocking—I bought it in 2006, so it’s pushing 20 years old, and this is only its second service. It’s had a hard life: I wore it daily for years before I started rotating in other watches, and titanium picks up dings easily. At the last two battery changes they even noted “condition poor” on the paperwork, which felt a little insulting if I’m honest.

So yes, I’ll be glad to have it back shiny and refreshed. What I’m less thrilled about is the price of the service. And yet, it’s not surprising. It’s about what I paid the last time I had another Omega serviced. The kicker? The cost of this service was actually more than what I paid for my Apple Watch.

That’s the point, really: watch costs are relative. The X-33 was the most expensive thing I had ever bought when I got it, and I still love it. But the idea that maintaining one watch can cost more than buying a brand-new Apple Watch puts the whole “Apple Watches are too expensive” complaint into perspective. For now, I’ll just be waiting a few weeks while the work gets done and chuckling at the absurdity of it all.

The photo is of a much younger X-33 right after getting a NATO strap for it, since the titanium band was getting beat up too much.

Building My Own Custom GPTs

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With some downtime on the bank holiday Monday, I finally tackled something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: creating several custom LLMs. I’ve been tinkering with agents for work and figured it was time to apply similar customizations for personal use.

Lately I’ve been bouncing between ChatGPT, Perplexity, Venice.ai, and even the new Proton AI for privacy. ChatGPT now lets you build custom GPTs, so I gave it a try. While we were on holiday, I had jotted down some customization requirements for a handful of GPTs I wanted, and this felt like the right time to build them.

For the past six to eight months, I’ve been planning holidays with different LLMs. The main frustration has been having to restate all my preferences every time I opened a new chat. Starting with a custom GPT just made sense—especially since I’ve got several term breaks to plan for over the next school year. Programming the GPT was straightforward. I haven’t used it to plan a full trip yet, but I’ve got the base built and I’ve started tinkering. High hopes for this one.

I also put together, though haven’t tested, a CISSP study guide helper. I want to sit for the test but don’t have a study buddy, so I figured why not make one?

Then there’s a slightly different use case: a custom GPT for days out with the kids. Same idea as the travel planner, but without flights and hotels—it’s more about what’s going on in London. I’m actively planning a week with the girls now and most of it is set, but I’ll see if this new GPT adds anything useful. The hardest part here was integrating the data I’ve been tracking on a Trello board with all the activities we’ve done or still want to do. I wanted the GPT to be able to use that context, but I’m cautious about sharing too much personal information with ChatGPT. That’s why I also use Venice.ai, which is a privacy-protecting, open-source based AI. Still, I experimented with exporting the Trello data to JSON and importing it into ChatGPT, and after some trial and error I finally got it working. In this case I had to use ChatGPT since I ran into file size limits with Venice.ai.

I’ve got a few more ideas I want to play with, but for now the three or four GPTs I’ve already built will keep me busy. I need to actually use them and see how they perform before I go any further. Early impressions are promising. Even so, as I remind colleagues and my kids, quoting the Doctor from Doctor Who: the AI lies. Don’t ever trust it completely. If you keep questioning it, though, the results can be pretty good.